Meet the man whose side hustle is testing side hustles

Spend any time on social media, and it’s only a matter of time before one genre of content starts hitting your timeline: Someone telling you they make a fortune by doing something that sounds absurdly easy. (And that you can, too.) 

Maybe they (kind of) show you how to design and sell your own sweatshirts or notebooks, a venture that supposedly earns them five figures a month. Or maybe they tell you about how they started a $100,000 business with no inventory. Whatever the enticing story is, the ending is usually the same: they offer to teach you how to do the same. And who would say no to easy money?

Get-rich-quick how-tos have existed forever—and more recently, side hustles have become a hallmark of American existence. According to SurveyMonkey’s 2025 Workplace Culture and Trends survey, 72% of U.S. workers either already have a side gig or are considering picking one up. That might explain why the past few years have flooded platforms like Instagram and TikTok with get-rich-quick guides, many of which seem to carry nearly identical talking points. 

These social media solopreneurs supposedly make incredible money by working only two to three hours a day, and they’re generous enough to share their wisdom with you. But how is anyone supposed to separate the legitimate techniques from the scams and the flops? Enter: the side hustle reviewer.

A “TRY GUY” FOR SIDE GIGS

The stated purpose of side-hustle review accounts is simple: they test out money-making schemes so you don’t have to. 

The people behind them are basically business guinea pigs who flip phones on Facebook marketplace and design T shirts that are “print-on-demand” (in which a third party creates the shirts the side hustlers design after a customer makes the purchase) on platforms like Redbubble and Shopify—all to see if they can actually make a buck. Other side hustles could include posting product videos on Amazon, or starting a newsletter. Often, they’ll break down how much money they made, and sometimes, they’ll even walk you through the fine print of the trade. 

This might sound altruistic on its face, and it can be. But in a way, it’s also its own kind of side hustle—one that, like all the others, comes with its own business incentives.

Few people know this better than Ryan, the 40-year-old tech worker behind Side Hustle Review. (He keeps his surname private to protect his full-time job.) 

Thanks to his 229,500 followers on TikTok and 473,000 on Instagram, Ryan says that sometimes, side-hustle platforms approach him with a simple offer: if he promotes their ecosystem, they’ll give him a cut of every paid sign-up he generates. Unfortunately, he adds, many of these platforms take would-be hustlers’ money without ever actually making money for them. In light of these offers, Ryan openly admits he could start an “evil arc,” exploiting viewer trust for personal gain by endorsing bogus money-making platforms.

“I’m not saying I would,” he says, “but the fact that that could happen makes me go, ‘I do have something very precious here.’” That’s why he always turns these offers down. 

It’s not just sketchy courses, either. When asked to name the weirdest side hustle he’s ever tried, Ryan dished on one he actually hasn’t tried: selling images of his feet. (Although he’s never uploaded a foot photo himself, he has received emails from less-than-ethical platforms asking him to share an affiliate link with his users in exchange for a cut of their sign-up fees.)

“[Users] pay the money to post their feet pictures thinking they’re going to make the money back, and they never do,” he says. At the same time, some of the ideas floating around on the internet are totally legitimate. 

SEPARATING WHEAT FROM CHAFF

The demand for the kind of service Ryan and other side-hustle reviewers provide is clearly there. The internet is rife with online courses and guides that claim to explain how to set up various businesses in exchange for a few hundred (or thousand) dollars. 

Ryan says he receives 80 to 90 DMs per day from viewers who want him to review this or that course, which is part of why he’s begun work on a site called review.courses. He hopes the site could grow into a sort of Yelp! for side hustles, where users can post their own reviews. 

As Ryan points out, the price tags some courses carry are incredibly high, especially for a product with no real regulatory body. Some can range from $5,000 to $8,000. 

“When you go to buy a $2,000 laptop, how many reviews do you watch?” Ryan asks. “Ten, 15, 20 before you make your purchase?” None of this exists for courses that teach you how to operate an online side hustle, and the ones that tend to go viral the fastest offer people what they most want: easy money. 

Some of these courses are complete cash grabs, Ryan says—they could be extremely vague, AI-generated, or copied straight from a guide the creator themselves previously purchased from someone else. “Once you buy the thing, it’s trash course, trash content.”

WHEN SIDE HUSTLE REVIEWING BECOMES THE SIDE HUSTLE

With the right strategy, Ryan says, you can make good money by creating, say, a print-on-demand T-shirt empire. Same goes for dropshipping, where you sell products without any actual inventory by purchasing the items from a third party after someone hits “Place Order.” 

When asked which side hustles’ viability actually surprised him, Ryan called out user-generated content: brand-related media created by social media users instead of the companies themselves. This could include product review videos, including Amazon on-site videos (product videos that anyone can post onto product pages in exchange for a cut of the commission if a customer makes a purchase after watching). 

Ryan was also pleasantly shocked by how easily he found success creating a newsletter, a scheme he’d thought for sure must be a scam. “I get a 40% open rate,” he says with audible surprise. “I guess people do want more emails.” 

And yet, it turns out that reviewing side hustles is more profitable than the hustles themselves. 

While Ryan cited $5,000 in gross revenue from testing in 2024, he made $35,000 from Side Hustle Review. That said, 90% of the latter income came from sponsorships, a revenue stream he’s since ended to preserve editorial independence and trust. “I find every sponsor comes to me with desired sales outcomes,” he says, “which really easily pushes me into becoming more of a salesperson.”

Given the direction corporate America has taken, side hustles seem bound for continued expansion, and their growing popularity is an ever-present sign that many workers, mistrustful of large companies, are bracing for a big shift. 

While some side hustlers are hedging their bets against an uncertain economy, others might be working to compensate for the bite inflation has taken out of their pockets. And the rest, Ryan figures, probably just want some disposable income. 

Regardless of the reason, he says, “I think we’re all feeling a bit of a squeeze.” 

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